An open-mid King of the Hill map using the Frontline pack in a North African setting - with a twist! Use the treasures of an excavated tomb to power-up and assist your team, but be sure to get out before the tomb gets you first!

The previous alpha made during the 72hr Jam was a mistake! But now hopefully things are fixed! It's gone through an extensive rehaul in layout and it should now play a lot better. I'd still like to go into testing this as a map with a gimmick rather than a gimmick map, so feedback encouraging proper gameplay development and making sure it actually plays nice as a map is the main goal! Here's what's changed:

Layout of mid expanded and revised immensely, making it a much more open area while also providing lots of variation and cover.

Streets between buildings have also opened up.

Control Point is now housed in a tomb and additional cover is provided by that.

Crypt revised to be more dangerous and less prone to being camped for the rare spell - it's now a treacherous hop and skip across a death pit to get to it and back.

Spawns revised to be pushed back and remove sightlines.

Attempted optimization, though it is likely not anywhere near where it should be at the moment.

Back paths to the crypt have been revised and no longer have direct view to spawns.

Signatures are an outdated concept that hold no bearing to forum conversations, but are given to people anyways to make them feel special and unique when in reality, they are special and unique, no matter if they have a signature or not.

im too lazy to take screenshots of the parts of the map i'm going to talk about (also tf2 likes to crash my laptop if its plugged in and im at like 10% battery atm) so i will try to describe areas of the map best i can

i am also too lazy to type like im not in a chatroom. i tend to ramble and i got some sleep to sleep. anyways:

mid is REALLY wide. like, mother of five children wide. wide mids for koth are kinda dangerous because you'll often end up segmenting the map into multiple fighting areas that aren't really relevant to each other, and when one of those fighting areas has the objective and the others don't, those side areas become kinda useless. the crypt works because it gives you Spooky Spell Powers, so it has a certain importance to it. the other side of mid feels kinda usless though, like it's a giant flank that also has a decent fighting arena in it? idk.

im kinda confused as to where the fighting is supposed to take place. the area between the crypt and the point is a decent fighting area, though its scaled a bit small to support the number of players that i think it needs to be a proper point fighting area. however it kinda sucks getting there cause either you take The Big Slope (see next paragraph) or the crypt flank, which is pretty far out of the way if you're trying to rotate between routes.

the big slope leading up to the point is a good scale, but it's just that - a giant slope. there's nothing particularly useful happening around the slope. if you wanna use the slope as your attacking route, you have no cover or alternate routes to take, and you're at a rather massive height disadvantage to people on the point.

pickup placement felt really weird?? i had a really hard time finding medium healths. idk if that has to do with them being in places i wasnt looking or if people just kept on taking them (i dont think there were patches under the pickups? please add them if they arent there already) or if there just weren't enough of them. pickup spots you can "rebound" from (i.e. you're falling back, grab a pickup, and then start pushing again) are good for players to retake the point, and it's difficult to rebound from a small health kit unless you're in fights where you take little damage (for example, if you have a height advantage that a koth map's point usually provides).

i don't recommend putting a full health near the point - viaduct specifically puts its medium healths a decent distance from the point (though not too far) so that the team holding the point either has to push forward or fall back to Juice Up. the full health in your map is in a decently dangerous position (kinda like gpit a's medium health below the point. its a risk to grab it, cause its in a confined space) but if your team already holds the point, that risk is basically moot.

there's an area that i think was kinda cool looking? it was on the non-crypt side of the point, a little bit behind the Big Slope. it seemed like a cool valley area but it was surrounded by a bunch of walls, so not a lot happened in it. i didn't really have anything profound to say about this area in the context of the rest of the map, but i remember thinking it could be a decent fighting area if there were more things for players to do there other than walk forward and backwards down a single route. honestly i could probably be making this up right now

tl;dr: remove things until every part of the layout matters cause there's a lot of fluff and it seems like battles rarely involve more than 4 people at a time. also make the "main" areas of the map have more options for players (which should go hand in hand with making routes more relevant, cause otherwise people will have very few places to go)

Yeah, it seems mid is causing issues, and I'll squeeze it back down a bit in A3. I'm also just considering removing the Halloween aspects altogether as its not really being received too well and is ultimately seen as more of a joke, but I'll leave that up for debate a bit. I'll try to get another test done soon and get some other feedback before deciding whether or not to get out the axe, though.

Would removing the roof over the cap and breaking down some of the walls into ruins help, you think? It'd open it back up a bit more while maintaining cover on the point, but I'm not sure.

That's a pretty cool idea! I guess it just seems out of place because you don't really delve too far to take a "treasure" besides opening the doors by capping. Maybe make the health kit more difficult to reach (down some stairs into a tomb) and it teleports you back to spawn with a buff? That way it could be similar to the timed events on hightower_event without having the randomness of spell books, and similar to probed where you can get buffs from the UFO.

Speaking of, maybe it's better to have the tomb re-sealed after 30 seconds of it being opened. Then it can open back up once it's capped again. It wouldn't give people successfully capturing to much of an advantage since they get sent back to spawn.

I don't know if this is more or less gimmicky than spellbooks, but they are just a few ideas I had!

Honestly I didn't enjoy this map because of the skeletons. They're laggy, buggy, unfun and just serve to distract from what seems to be a decent map, I just never got to play on it properly because I was trying to kill buggy skeletons the entire time.

The layout lends itself to chaos - there's a lot of choices on where to go, and the main area of the map is quite wide - you can get ambushed from a variety of directions while standing on the point. The visual style doesn't really help with this - there's a lot of deep saturated colors and not a lot of contrast that helps me understand the geometry easily. I felt like I was playing in a haze or something; my brain just wasn't able to deal with the map and I couldn't really make tactical decisions.

I think chaotic gameplay can work (although I think you'll still need to revise the layout to be more simple), but the color scheme isn't doing you any favors. Use a ground texture that isn't the same color as your walls, and consider toning down the colored lighting.

Honestly I didn't enjoy this map because of the skeletons. They're laggy, buggy, unfun and just serve to distract from what seems to be a decent map, I just never got to play on it properly because I was trying to kill buggy skeletons the entire time.

I've been having issues uploading to the site, so I haven't been able to get my alphas updated on here. Seeing as how A5 is going to be tested in tonight's Gameday, I'll post here the current looks and changes of A5 as I can't do it through the downloads section. A4 was brief but had a few major flaws, and also could not be uploaded, hence the quick release and rehaul for A5.

Improved lighting drastically. Neutral colors now balance out the majority of the play area to reduce confusion in the heat of battle, and directional lights have been added to emphasize alternate routes. Brightness of lights in general has also been increased.

Overall skybox lighting has been changed to be much easier on the eyes and more beneficial to players, especially those with colorblindness.

Expanded on balconies at mid on the crypt's side.

Crypt has also been moved closer to the point.

Added more health and ammo between mid and spawns, as well as small health near the point.

Changed clipping on stairs and complex geometry from playerclip to blockbullets2 to avoid projectiles getting caught.

Removed collision of wall-mounted torches.

Added directional signs along routes to mid.

Begun detailing at mid.

Changed soundscapes outside of the crypt to use Badlands soundscapes rather than the loud Halloween ones.

Removed skeletons and the Skeleton King for the time being.

Updated deathpit to ignite players before dying.

Raised boards near the common sniper positions at mid on the opposite side of the crypt to prevent snipers from jumping on top of the boards and circumventing their intended sightline-breaking purpose.

Previously mentioned sniper position now has an alternate route from the building at mid, allowing attackers to fight back and make it less of a safe space.

Eliminated sightlines across the map by expanding some geometry around the surrounding cap buildings and rerouting a back entrance to the market area.

Added obelisks in place of the previous rocks at mid to cut sightlines and provide additional cover and throw off jumpers.

Playerclipped the top of the building at mid to prevent capable classes from jumping up there and dominating the point.

Additional optimization.

Fixed clipping bugs.

Enjoy A5 in the Gameday! I'll be sure to upload the file to the site when it allows me to. For now, here's a Drobox link.

Hey so turns out Chrome was causing all the issues with uploading so here I am on damn Internet Explorer with A6 of Toto! Here's what changed!

- Sectioned off mid with big gates to make it a fully-enclosed arena to cut sightlines, cut vvis, and improve on some gameplay issues.
- Killed a few dominating sightlines on the side opposite of the tomb.
- Added additional cover between the new gate entrance and the point.
- Increased size of the point by 50%.
- Added medium ammo to the structures on either side of the point, next to the gates.
- Removed crates in front of spawn.
- Applied func_nobuild to the point's stairs, as it was possible to make a nearly indestructuable Sentry low on the stairs and peek over the top, slaying any attackers.
- Removed faulty playerclip brush left over from an area rehaul.
- Moved side entrances to the tomb forward to avoid players from immediately running into a dead end prior to the point being capped.
- Fixed a few displacement seams.
- Fixed clipping issues with some tops of buildings.
- Brightened up the paths leading to the point.
- Added directional arrows and light leading players on the main route to the point, while still indicating alternate routes.
- Fixed faulty geometry sticking out where it shouldn't have.
- Continued work on optimization, though the openness of mid is still an issue to be fully tackled.

It's nice I have to say. Also having asymmetrical pickups on the left and right side of the control point (basically the left and right side of mid) is bad. RED would be able to get this faster and BLU and vice versa etc. So it's better off to having either both of the pickups be the same or being moved to a different spot on BLU and RED side.

It's nice I have to say. Also having asymmetrical pickups on the left and right side of the control point (basically the left and right side of mid) is bad. RED would be able to get this faster and BLU and vice versa etc. So it's better off to having either both of the pickups be the same or being moved to a different spot on BLU and RED side.

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As much as I personally obsess over this type of balancing in my own maps, I don't think it's that big of a deal. If I'm thinking of the same packs as you, it's a tiny difference and basically a non-issue.